


Fell

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rich Harden just straight-up converts Mark Mulder.  Because he is Richie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fell

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted March 2005.

Fell  
By Candle Beck

Rich Harden gets a bus ticket for Oakland in the Sacramento River Cats’ locker room on the nineteenth of July, 2003. It’s too close, really, for a plane, and his pitching coach tells him gruffly, “Buy a fucking car, kid, jesus.” Harden figures he probably will. Once he’s there.

He packs all his stuff in two bags, which is kind of impressive, but it’s been two and a half years of this, this is the fifth time he’s packed up his whole life and moved someplace increasingly different, and now Oakland, which is the point of it all, the only reason he’s stayed.

The boys take him out, give him liquor to drink and warm bodies to slouch against when walking gets hard. He wants to get them all to sign a hat or a T-shirt or something like that, he needs a yearbook.

They put him on the bus at twelve thirty-five in the morning, and he waves out the window, thinking that you can’t possibly look cool while waving out a bus window. He passes out for a little while, but wakes up as they come over the mountain, slide down towards the water, the bay, and Oakland a bright dirty spot on the edge, and they drive right past the stadium because it’s just off the highway, like, a parking lot away, and Harden recognizes it by the lights.

He’s watched this team all summer. They’re his absolute favorite, and for more than the obvious reasons. He loves to watch them play, can’t get enough of it. He’s just been another fan, out in Sacramento all year.

He gets dropped off at a hotel, pretty sure it’s the same one they book for visiting teams, and lies back on the bed. It’s past four in the morning and he has to be at the ballpark at nine. Rich Harden is twenty-one years old and tomorrow he’s gonna be a major league pitcher.

He thinks, briefly, about the night he left college, halfway through April two years ago, and how his buddies had left nothing undone, until he was just fucking happy and didn’t even care that he was leaving. He went with them to steal some chairs off the porch of the frat house that they’d been feuding with all semester, and then hugged them all goodbye on the street and got in the cab.

His best friend at school made him a mix full of songs about California, even though Harden was going to Vancouver for Class A, going home. There aren’t too many good songs about British Columbia, anyway.

Harden listened to his headphones and watched Arizona roll by out the cab window, looking alien and stark, reminding him of old Calvin and Hobbes comics. He remembers thinking about oceans and bridges and highways, wondering what he was gonna miss.

Harden sighs and curls up on his side on the hotel bed. He falls asleep, and will always be amazed that he could, and doesn’t remember anything for the next four hours.

*

He wakes up and goes to the ballpark. He changes his T-shirt four times, because he’s antsy and needs to keep moving, yawning incessantly. He wets his hair and calls his dad from the cab, fiddling with the zipper on his bag and pulling his cap brim down low over his eyes to block the sun.

Harden gets shown around and introduced to everybody. He recognizes every single person in the room—it’s kind of eerie. The locker Macha shows him to is next to Barry Zito’s, a guitar case with a white home jersey slung across the top of it, a little rubber smiling Buddha figure on the shelf, yellow and squeakable, and Harden thinks that at least there’s already one freak on the team.

Zito comes over and grins at him before commencing to rummage around in his locker, a CD case bit between his teeth. Harden sits on the small chair, and rolls the hem of his shirt between his fingers.

Zito sighs loudly, then calls across the room, “Mark! C’mere and talk to me for a second.”

Harden looks up, and sees Mark Mulder rolling his eyes and standing, walking over to them. Zito pokes Mulder in the arm, wide happy smile on his face. They start talking quickly about something that happened the night before, something complicated that involved a streetlamp and a shopping cart. Eventually Mulder says, “’Kay, I gotta go do that thing.”

As he’s turning to leave, he stops, narrowing his eyes at Harden, there on the chair trying to look casual. Harden doesn’t look up, because Mulder’s one of the few on the team that he hasn’t met yet, and that was kind of intentional, because it’s Mark fucking Mulder, and a guy needs some time to prepare, get his courage up.

“Hey.” Harden glances out of the corner of his eye unwillingly, and Mulder points at him. “You’re here now, that’s good. We’ve been waiting.” And Mulder claps him on the arm, just like he’s supposed to, and Harden is stunned for awhile, thinking that Mulder knew _him_ , before they’d met, Mark Mulder out of everybody recognized his face.

*

The game passes in about seven minutes, Harden staying in the same spot on the bench without moving for the whole of it. It’s pretty much everything he thought it would be. He figures, once he gets out there himself, it’ll be even better.

They win. It feels like a good omen.

Back in the clubhouse, he gets to talking with Tim Hudson, about right-handed pitching stuff and how not to flip the fuck out. Hudson shrugs and grins crookedly at him.

“You get used to it pretty quick, I guess. It’s hard not to.” Hudson turns his cap around backwards. “Don’t worry. The boys love rookies.” The smile on his face gets vaguely wolfish.

Harden eyes him warily. That doesn’t sound at all reassuring.

Mulder’s locker is right next to Hudson’s, and he sort of inches his way into the conversation, standing behind Harden’s chair with a towel around his neck. When there’s a natural lull, Mulder punches Harden in the shoulder and asks, “So are you sleeping on the streets, or what?”

Harden swivels to look up and backwards, feeling stupid. “No, uh. It’s, I’m staying in a hotel. Like, you know. Hotel.”

Mulder smirks, upside down and hard to define. “Yeah?”

Harden nods emphatically, glad to have one thing that he’s sure of, and he’s not expecting Mulder to say off-hand, “Well, we got an extra room, you know, so if that gets old.”

Harden looks at him, nonplussed, waiting for the punchline. Mulder raises his eyebrows expectantly, and Harden looks at Hudson, realizes that Mulder’s actually, like, _offering_.

Rich Harden somehow finds it in him to accept, so that’s how he ends up going home with Mulder his second night in town.

The house is halfway into the hills, long curving roads with big plots of land, and the driveway is absurdly packed with brand-new cars, chrome and shine and silver rims. Harden gapes and remembers that he was just planning on getting a secondhand Volvo or something. Obviously there’s a horizon to be expanded.

It’s late by the time they get back, having gone out for beers with Zito and Chavez, then over to the hotel to pick up some of Harden’s stuff. Mulder toes off his shoes in the front hallway, and pulls his shirt off as he walks down the hallway without turning on the light. Now he’s just wearing wife-beater, which is pretty awesome.

“Right, so.” Mulder flicks his hand. “There’s the bathroom. That’s the kitchen. Here’s me. Here’s you.” He nods affirmatively. “Good? Good. If you’re up first in the morning, make some coffee. Night.”

Mulder goes into his room without a backwards glance, leaving Harden standing in the hall. He wanders around for a minute, looks out on the back patio, the pool blue-lit and cold. The cabinets in the kitchen are clearly labeled with the roommates’ names.

In his room, Harden decides not to unpack just yet, for fear of jinxing it, and strips down to his boxers. The bed is clean and stale and wonderful. Harden thinks that this is all working out just fine.

He’ll only stay here for a few days, anyway. He’s gonna find a place of his own, that was the plan. He can afford it, or if he can’t, he will be able to soon enough and it’ll come out even in the end. Maybe in San Francisco, have a rooftop with a view.

Harden’s not all that bright, but he’s aware that he has weaknesses, things that he has an absolute hell of a time recovering from. He does his best to avoid them, but has never had much luck at that. He’s also aware that Mark Mulder is the living and breathing embodiment of just about every one of those weaknesses, and moving in with him is something that must remain completely beyond consideration.

Harden remembers Mulder taking off his shirt in the hallway, badly shadowed, and falls asleep thinking about it. He ends up staying for the next three months.

*

His fourth night living with Mulder and the other guys, the wind picks up and Harden learns that there are chimes on the back porch. It’s in the background all night, as they hang out and play videogames and get food delivered. Nobody else seems to hear it, and Harden wonders if he’s going crazy.

Eventually, standing in the kitchen with his shoes off and a mostly full beer in his hand, Harden kicks Mulder in the shin and says, “Dude, what the hell is that noise?” It’s louder here, it sounds like it’s right over his shoulder.

Mulder kicks him back, clipping his ankle painfully. “Windchimes, man. They were here when we moved in.”

Harden says “oh,” weirdly disappointed that the explanation isn’t something a little more mysterious and interesting than that. Mulder takes him out back and shows him, chilly cement under his feet. Harden nods and pushes at it with his hand, making it twist and ring.

He hears it all the time, through the weather of this midsummer. The wind and the heat together to make it perfect. Lying in bed with his portable radio from the eighties listening to a San Francisco Giants game (because he still has to be a fan of somebody, other than himself), shirtless with the window open, sipping Coke and hearing the windchimes from out the window and around the corner. Nighttime and dinner time and sometimes really bad around dawn. The afternoons are the worst for the wind, though, as everybody already knows. They have to play in the afternoon, and it’s a tough pitcher’s park to begin with.

It’s good place to live, though.

Mulder forgets to ask him for rent. Or at least that’s the way it seems. When Harden, increasingly guilty about Kato-ing in the spare bedroom, finally hedges the question, Mulder goes into a long ramble about how they split up the rent three ways at the beginning of the season and it would be a whole restructuring thing to get Harden into it now. “Anyway, you’re poor,” Mulder says at the end, and the discussion ends right there.

Harden’s got three months rich and free, and he will take every day of it. He’s got just the best luck in the world right now.

*

The team’s not like he expected. They break up along odd lines.

They’re all together all the time, but within the twenty-five of them are certain camps and allegiances. There’s the Byrnes-Zito contingent, accompanied by Eric Chavez when he’s going through a manic period. There’s Hatteberg and Hudson, who are actual, like, grown-ups, and go to bed early on road trips so they can call home and say goodnight to their kids. And there’s Mark and Mark, Ellis and Mulder, who are probably the tightest out of everybody, bound by name and a rough mutual affection that reminds Harden starkly of how guys are friends in college.

Ellis lives with them too, a linen closet down the hall from Harden’s room, and Harden wakes up to shouts from the living room, which means they’re playing Super Mario Kart, because only Super Mario Kart makes them holler like that. They spend afternoons on the pool deck; neither of them can stand to be out of the sun for too long. Sometimes Ellis goes back to Mulder’s room at the end of the hall so they can talk about stuff they don’t want anybody else to hear. They make Harden feel last-picked, left out, inconsequential, and naturally he thinks them all the more cool because of it.

The team never lets him forget that he’s not only a rookie, he’s a very young rookie. The favorite victim, pranks and bad jokes and waking up in a hotel room with Sharpie drawings all over his hands.

Being from Canada doesn’t help, either. Harden takes it all calmly, resignedly. He’s not much fun to tease, because he never shows anger or irritation, but they give it their all.

Harden is generally allowed to wander between the cliques as he pleases. He and Zito bond one night over what’s it’s like, or was like, to be this young and this new and already key to the rotation, but that’s really all they can find to talk about, which is weird because that’s not nearly the only thing they have in common.

Harden sees Zito watching certain guys with the same attention he gives the college girls who come up shyly and ask for autographs. Harden sees Zito watching Mulder, and Hudson, and sometimes Chavez, with a specific tilt to his head, and heated sort of focus in his face, and it’s not like Harden hasn’t perfectly honed his ability to pick up on this stuff.

He thinks Zito might know about him too, because he’s probably not any more subtle about checking out guys, and Zito would know how to spot it. Sometimes they exchange solemn looks of acknowledgement, and it feels all secretive and dangerous, and then other times Harden will catch Zito’s eyes as they’re both casually sneaking glances at Mulder getting dressed, and Zito will grin faintly at him, like, isn’t it great to be gay and in the Oakland Athletics’ locker room?

Harden feels like he and Zito should be something, at least, they should be friends or enemies or sleeping together or _something_ , but really they’re pretty ambivalent towards each other, potential be damned.

And Hudson doesn’t talk to him like he’s dumb, and Mulder and Ellis always make enough toast for him in the morning, and Chavez starts to call him by his actual first name, more of a nickname than a taunt, and Harden finds himself answering to Jimmy.

July ends without him even noticing, and in his first four starts, Rich Harden has gone 3-0 with a 1.33 ERA. He’s not sure how to make friends among these guys, but his fastball and his numbers are all anyone needs to see. For everything that he can do well and everything that he can’t do at all, Harden at least has a place here, a seat saved for him if he’s running late.

And for awhile now, there’s been a pretty clear pattern. Where Mark Mulder goes, Rich Harden follows. Mulder goes to get a beer, Harden’s right behind, leaning against the counter and flicking bottle-caps. Mulder goes down to the clubhouse for some tape, and hey, he’s got company. Mulder goes to his room to get a new CD, and Harden’s on his heels offering suggestions and recommending, “something with actual, you know, instruments might be good,” to no avail because Mulder has nothing but synthesizer, bass, and drums.

Mulder checks his email late at night, after everyone else has fallen in, and Harden’s lying on Mulder’s bed, tossing a baseball to himself in a narrow parabola, still chewing gum. This is his day, and night, and life.

Mulder doesn’t tell him to back off, which is a bit more than surprising. Harden really expected him to, right from the start. Mulder should have said, “Dude, get the fuck _away_ , for christ’s sake,” but instead he just sort of shrugged, like, hell with it. Rich Harden attached to his airspace, why the fuck not.

They talk a lot, always being in the same room the way they are. Harden learns that Eric Chavez is a lot more fucked up than he looks, and that Zito and Ellis won’t even speak to each other anymore, and that Mulder doesn’t know that Zito wants to fuck him, and that everybody used to be a much more at peace than they are now, and Mulder says, “the really weird thing is, we’re playing so well. Everybody right now. All of us and even you, a little bit.” And he grins and Harden smacks him, and Harden thinks about all these stories, this history they’re living.

Harden comes home one afternoon and Mulder and Ellis are on the roof, hurling water balloons into the air and then shooting them down with a handheld BB gun. Harden gets out of his car and squints, the sun behind the both of them, swallowing them up.

Mulder sees him first and calls, “Richie!” Harden manufactures Mulder’s grin in his mind because he can’t make out Mulder’s face from down here, and smiles back, waves, his eyes closed against the sun, before going to the ladder canted against the side of the house and climbing up.

Mulder keeps throwing the balloons out of the range of the gun, out over the cherry tree on the other side of the driveway, splashing down on the cars. Ellis shoves at him and says, “Not so hard, man, c’mon.”

Mulder makes a dismissive noise, looking away towards Mount Diablo at the space in the horizon. Harden thinks that Mulder would have no idea how to throw something with less than his whole arm, no more than he could breathe with only part of his lungs or live with just half his heart.

Sitting with his back against the chimney, Harden watches them lazily, calling out occasional tips and criticism, and Mulder wings one right above his head, exploding into the chimney stone and raining down on him. It’s two weeks into August and warm enough that Harden can feel the water evaporating out of his hair and shirt. Mulder is a silhouette against the sky, bisected by the tree line, and he holds the BB gun in both hands with his arms held straight, a perfect angle.

Harden closes his eyes and thinks, ‘fucking _christ_.’ He’s broken the cardinal rule of the Gay Boy Code: never, under any circumstances, fall for a straight guy. It’d be a pretty disheartening realization, but Mulder’s voice is clean in his ears and he knows what he’ll see when he’s ready to look again.

*

Not too long after that, Mulder breaks his hip.

Harden’s on the bench, and he can tell that Mulder’s struggling, coming down on his front leg wrong, but it doesn’t look like much. It’s a very bright day, and Harden is tired, and he yawns as Hernandez calls time and trots out, rolls his neck a minute later when Macha is waved out.

He’s idly eavesdropping on Byrnes and Zito a little ways down the bench, talking with great enthusiasm about some bar in Austin, Texas, of all places, and he sees Macha turn and look to the trainers. That’s when Harden starts to pay attention.

Mulder walks off the field and it’s mostly Harden’s imagination that he’s limping, but not totally. He waits two innings before going down, arranging some dumb excuse in his head for why he’s there, but the trainer’s room door is closed and so he just loiters in the hallway for a minute before heading back up to the field.

They take Mulder to the hospital to get X-rays after the game, and Harden rides home with Ellis, neither of them saying much. Harden still hasn’t bought a car, and the passenger seat window is his primary view of the world.

Mulder gets home late that night, weaving a bit. Harden’s in the kitchen, watching popcorn in the microwave. Mulder grins at him. He’s got a crutch in one hand. “Stress fracture,” he says without inflection. “Be out six weeks minimum.”

Harden blinks and for a moment can’t force himself to breathe. So much worse than he thought. He says intelligently, “Oh.”

Mulder takes the seat across from him at the table, and immediately asks Harden to get him a beer.

*

With Mulder gone, Harden for the first time feels the team as a team. Everything just hikes up to the next level, the sense of urgency and concentration, the lines connecting them pulling taut and close. Making up for the loss of Mulder is a consuming thing, for all of them.

But more for Harden.

They’re based on the rotation. And the rotation, the part that matters, that has always mattered, is one, two, and three. Something starts to happen around Harden. People start to look at him more, talk about him more. Jerseys with his name are suddenly selling swiftly in the team shop. Harden is trying very hard to live up to all this.

Mulder comes to the ballpark and keeps his face blank for hours at a time. Mostly, he watches them win. Ten games in a row, flying into September, and Harden remembers feeling light-headed and breathless. He can’t imagine twenty games. Can’t even try.

And they keep holding the Mariners off and Harden gets better control of the slider than he’s ever had before, and everything is terrific, and Mulder is waiting for them at the end of road trips, in the parking lot with his sunglasses on, and he doesn’t look hurt at all, is the strange thing. He’s got his crutch, but he hardly ever uses it. He just carries it around like an accessory. He can do everything he normally does, except pitch.

They tell him about the trip on the ride home, and all that next night and day, until he’s fully caught up and can laugh at the same jokes again. It’s nothing. He’d do the same for any of them.

Harden knows this is just the latest in a litany of injuries in Mark Mulder’s short life, but it’s the first he’s seen of it. It seems impossible at times, this broken thing inside.

Then Harden gets up for some water in the middle of the night and Mulder’s in the living room watching TV, looking exhausted and pained.

The pain medication and the bone-growth pills have fucked up Mulder’s sleep cycles something fierce. Harden knows this, has known it, because Mulder’s often cursing violently in the mornings, and the dark patches under his eyes keep getting dug further in. But it never really occurred to him in this concrete fashion, the couch and the glass of water on the coffee table and Mulder’s crutch on the floor.

Harden sits down next to him, not saying anything. They watch some old sitcom that he doesn’t recognize, and then Mulder says, “It’s okay, man. You can go to bed.”

Harden looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “What. You want me to?”

Mulder sighs. “You don’t have to keep me company. Sometimes, like. It’s like this all night.”

Scratching the back of his head, Harden keeps his eyes on the television, quick shifting color and a laugh-track in the background. “I’ve actually never stayed up all night.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Seriously.”

“Dude. How is that even possible?”

Harden shrugs. He’s got an off-switch timer in his brain, set for just before dawn. No matter where he is or what he’s doing, it goes off and it’s all he can do to curl up on the floor before he passes out.

It’s not a bad thing, as far as he can tell. Seems like most people would generally avoid staying up all night, if they had a choice about it.

They stay up. They watch movies on pay television that they’ve already seen twelve times, but really, who says no to ‘Face/Off’? Nobody Rich Harden wants to hang out with.

Mulder’s sitting oddly straight beside him, his legs bent and his shoulders high. Harden’s pretty sure one of the things on Mulder’s ‘how not to aggravate the motherfucker’ list is not putting pressure on it by slouching.

So there’s a way Mulder shows it, at least. Also, it’s wrapped, his upper leg and around his hip, the break in his femur, actually, but he feels it most in his hip. This is something Harden would actually rather not know, but he’s seen the tight strip of bandages more than once, over the tops of his boxers, in the locker room, low low low on his stomach.

Mulder takes a pain pill at around four in the morning and gives one to Harden, who hesitates only a moment before following suit. In a half-hour or so, the world’s a lovely place. Harden goes drifting, feeling nothing.

“This sort of sucks,” Mulder says.

Harden rolls his head over. Mulder looks irritated and close to death. “It’s so fucking obnoxious. If I can’t pitch, I can’t sleep,” Mulder explains carefully. He makes little pitch motions with his hand, swiftly through the air with his fingers set for sliders, his wrist snapping. “Like, you know?”

Harden nods. Really seems to be the only option. He figures everybody breaks down in a different way. He imagines a life without baseball, Mulder’s life, right here and now in the best month Harden can remember. “Yeah. I know. Um. It’s the way it is with us now, without you around. I mean, not totally. But like. Something missing. I get it.”

Mulder smirks, and it looks in slow motion to Harden, like a commercial. “You probably miss me more, though, huh.”

Harden looks away, fights down the urge to nod automatically again. “Little bit, yeah.”

Mulder laughs and puts his hand on the back of Harden’s neck, and says, “see, I always knew you were smart.”

Harden grins. He’s very far from smart, but Mulder doesn’t have to know that. He shifts subtly against Mulder’s hand, tipping his head back so his hair touches Mulder’s fingers. “I guess, mainly, it’s how you’ve always been around. You always talk to me and stuff. There’s all this stuff that I’m trying to figure out. ”

“You can talk to Huddy, though. Probably should, even, he’s, like, the righty perspective.”

Harden shakes his head, and Mulder’s hand falls off the back of his neck, and Harden wants to just pick it up and put it back, clamp Mulder’s hand down tightly with his own and feeling knuckles pressed into his palm. “Huddy’s not the same. It’s not about being a righty.”

“So what’s it about?” Mulder asks, hiking his eyebrows and rubbing his hand across his mouth.

Harden would like the ability to say what he means, but it’s as absent in him as it ever is. His forehead lines as he tries to work it out. “It’s about being. Good. Like you. I mean, not, not that Huddy’s not. Because he’s definitely better than, like, six of me. But with you, it’s all. It doesn’t even look hard. I know it _is_ hard, I know, but you just. You look so good all the time.” Harden shrugs, sighing. “Anyway, that’s how I wanna be. I don’t even wanna think about it.”

He pauses, and reviews, worried that he said something wrong, or gave something away, but Mulder just says, like Harden’s not being weird at all, “You can’t not think about it. I mean, you can try, but you won’t be able to. And nothing that looks easy really is, not ever.”

Mulder half-smiles at him. Mulder makes everything look so uncomplicated, and that’s probably why Harden takes a breath and puts his hand on Mulder’s knee, then leans forward and kisses him, fast on the mouth. It’s real quick because Harden doesn’t want to feel Mulder jerk away.

Mulder stares at him, and Harden bites his tongue. “Oh, and. Also? I’m kinda gay.”

Mulder’s throat moves. “You’re.”

Oh, christ, nodding again. Lord. “Have been for years.”

“Huh.” Mulder tilts his head quizzically, blinking very slowly. “And then you kissed me.”

“I did do that, yes,” Harden confirms, because there’s really no arguing about it.

“I’m not. Or anything,” Mulder says, pushing his thumb into his leg over his knee, and Harden slumps back, crosses his arms over his chest.

“I know,” he answers sullenly. “I know that. I just wanted to. Check.”

Mulder looks at him suspiciously for a minute, then nods warily. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

Harden can see the light on Mulder’s back and the side of his face. The sun’s coming up outside and soon he’ll be asleep.

*

And the thing is, Mulder’s absolutely right. He’s not gay, not remotely gay, and Harden has known that since day one, and he doesn’t know what the fuck he was thinking. The cardinal rule of the Gay Boy Code exists for a reason, because now Mulder won’t talk to him, not unless he has to, and won’t come near him.

Harden finds himself across the room all the time, against the wall, the other end of the dugout, the living room when Mulder’s in the kitchen, the patio when Mulder’s in the living room. It’s a drastic reversal of everything to this point, and now Harden’s confused again, he’s not sure how he fits.

After a couple of days of this, Chavez wanders over in the clubhouse and starts nosing around in Harden’s locker. Harden smacks him. “Hello? I’m sitting right here.”

“I’m not stealing anything, don’t be so fucking touchy,” Chavez tells him absently, taking out a guitar magazine and flipping through it. “Where’s your shadow?” Harden looks at him questioningly, and Chavez waves his hand around. “Mulder.”

“Oh,” Harden says, flushing, slipping down in the chair with his shoulders hunched. “I dunno.”

Chavez glances at him sidelong, but Harden knows he’s looking for dirt. “Something happen?”

His face feeling dull and hot, Harden nods once, keeping his eyes focused on the floor. If there’s a God, he won’t be asked to elaborate. Harden can’t lie for shit. Chavez claps him on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it. Meant to tell you earlier. Mulder’s fucking crazy. It’s good you got out when you did.”

Harden looks up, thinking maybe this is one of Chavez’s little jokes that he never gets. But Chavez is just skimming the magazine, ripping out an Absolut ad and pocketing it. Chavez collects them, he’s got a gallery.

Harden thinks about the three years that Chavez lived with Mulder, and how he’s never even seen them fight, not for real. And he thinks about Zito, over there sucking on the arcade game, who’s wanted Mulder for probably half a decade now, and for all his fucking matchbook philosophy was still smart enough not to do anything about it. It took Harden all of a month to fuck it up, but then, Harden’s always been ahead of the curve. So to speak.

Harden presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, elbows on his knees. This is terrible, and he didn’t even mean anything by it, not really. He wasn’t expecting anything, he just thought. He didn’t think.

He takes a steadying breath and lets his hands fall. Chavez starts to say something about an article in the magazine, and Harden mumbles, “just keep it, okay,” and gets up, intending to hole up in the video room until the game starts.

Things being as they are, of course, Mulder’s there, glancing over his shoulder when Harden comes in, and time stops for a minute, and then Mulder turns back and says flatly to the screen, “hey,” and clocks all around the world resume ticking, as Rich Harden falls back out the door and half-runs down the hallway.

God _damn_.

*

One night, the wind divebombs through the hills, and the chimes crack against the kitchen window, leaving a long silver splinter in the glass. Ellis takes them down and puts them in the garage and Harden can’t sleep, listening for it.

The next day, it’s overcast and spitting rain, stubborn late-summer rain from off the bay. Harden keeps his hood up, his hands in his pockets. He pitches badly, everything overthrown flat and a low deep ache in his shoulder by the fifth. His talent has evened out, over the past few weeks, skidded back from the height of July, and all the noise around him has quieted, but that’s the only good thing.

Not being able to talk to Mulder about pitching is kinda worse than he’s prepared for. Harden knows he’s supposed to be collectively owned by this team, but Mulder definitely has a possession-is-nine-tenths-of-the-law hold on him. Or did have, anyway. Now it’s just belt-high fastballs and heavy curves.

Mulder’s in the trainer’s room when Harden gets his arm iced, and they each coolly ignore the other, even though the guys working on the two of them are talking, even though they’re on adjacent tables. Mulder stares up at the ceiling, lying on his back with one hand under his head. Harden holds up his arm for the tape to get wrapped, and keeps his gaze just over the plane of Mulder’s stomach.

As he’s leaving, Harden looks back and Mulder’s watching him, head rolled to the side and his eyes narrowed, looking intent and suspicious. Harden doesn’t even know what he’s trying to see in Mulder anymore, there’s nothing here that he recognizes.

Back in the clubhouse, Harden folds into the couch and doesn’t say anything to anybody, until Zito crashes down next to him and says, “Shitty day, man, huh?”

Harden moves his head to the side, closing his eyes. “Yeah, but what’s a little rain?” he answers.

*

He’s out late, trying to burn through, and he gets lost in San Francisco. It’s two in the morning and he’s so drunk he’s barely vertical. The city is all hills and parks and creepy Victorian houses, and the neighborhoods go on and on. He finds a street light, with his back to trees and grass, and calls Mark Ellis. He has no fucking idea where he is. There is no way he gets home from here.

It rings until just before the message, and then Mulder answers, “Message service.”

“Uh,” Harden sways and catches himself. He’s sick to his stomach and fantastically tired. “Mark?”

Mulder takes a moment. “Rich boy.”

“I was, um. Ellis?”

“He’s out right now. You can try back later.”

“Hey, wait.” Harden doesn’t like this streetlamp place. It’s all sharp and pretty. “You gotta help me. I’m lost.”

Mulder sighs and establishes that Harden is also hammered, and talks him through getting the street intersection before saying, “’Kay, lemme call you back in a minute.”

Harden sits on the curb with his phone on his knee. The cars shoot past. He thinks that this is shaping up to be the first time he’ll be alone with Mulder in days, maybe even a week, not counting the video room, which Harden has decided didn’t really happen at all.

His phone goes off, but it’s not Mulder’s number. Harden’s drunk enough to be worried, but he can’t not answer.

“Dude?”

It’s Zito. Harden’s really confused. “Hi.”

“Where are you?”

“I was, um. Talking to Mulder, a minute ago?”

“Yeah I know. He called me because he doesn’t know how to get to wherever the fuck you are. You tell me and I’ll tell him, I definitely don’t trust you to make sense trying to tell him yourself.”

“Hey!” Harden scowls. “I talk fine around him.”

“Oh, I completely agree. Just tell me.”

Zito informs him that he’s on Fell Street by the panhandle, a strip of Golden Gate Park a block wide and twenty blocks long. The whole Fell Street thing is pretty spooky. The street where he fell, or was felled, maybe, something like that.

Harden waits on the curb, not liking the park at his back one bit, hugging his knees and feeling stupid and young, twenty-one years old and unable to hold his liquor, and he’d even gone to college.

Mulder pulls up in the black car, wearing sweat pants and no shoes, probably not pulled out of bed, but as close as Mulder gets these days. He’s got a little self-drawn map, Zito’s instructions neatly at the top.

Mulder smiles quickly enough at him, only a little bit guarded, setting the tone. “Having a rough night?”

Harden rests his head on the window, glad to be off the curb and in somewhere soft and warm. “Rough enough that I won’t remember it, hallelujah.”

He’s got his eyes closed so he doesn’t know where they’re going until Mulder suddenly stops the car. Harden looks and they’re parked in an alley. He’s pretty sure it’s still San Francisco.

Mulder has his hands on the wheel for a long time, studying Harden closely. “I’ve been thinking about your, you know, your whole deal.”

Harden sits up straighter. “I have a deal?”

“The thing where you wanna be, like. Whatever. With me.”

“Oh, that. Yeah. I guess,” Harden says, rubbing his eyes and moving his shoulders a bit uncomfortably.

Harden won’t look over there, wishing at once that he weren’t quite so drunk. It feels weird to not be moving.

Mulder puts his hand on Harden’s arm, fingers curled. “I was thinking that maybe that would be okay.”

Oh, so. This is the thing where, right, it’s just like this. And Harden is again and again wishing that he was sober, because Mulder pulls him near and experimentally kisses him. Harden is not too drunk to know what to do, angling his head and kissing back harder. Mulder may be new to this, the specific and essential differences of doing this with a guy instead of a girl, but Harden doesn’t even remember learning it.

He’s reminded, just for a second, of an afternoon five years ago, on the back field at his high school, messing around with the new speed gun the team had just gotten, and his teammate calling out, “One hundred miles an hour, Jesus Christ.” The first time Rich Harden knew for sure.

Ten or fifteen minutes pass. It’s pretty cool. Harden gets as far under Mulder’s shirt as the bandage around his hip, and Mulder pushes him away, breathing hard, and starts the car, driving them home like the devil’s chasing, and they get into the front hallway before they start to lose clothes.

They do the stuff that Mulder can do with the injury, and Harden just can’t believe it. Out of everything to happen right now, Mark Mulder wanting to sleep with him, too. This fucking season.

Harden is passing out even towards the end, but he hears Mulder say as he falls back next to Harden, his head touching Harden’s shoulder, “So, yeah, this’ll be happening a lot more, all right?”

Harden grins idiotically and nods emphatically into the bed. Mulder falls asleep and Harden feels it happen against his back.

*

Harden doesn’t believe in circumstantial homosexuality. He doesn’t believe in being gay for one person, or being gay as an element of a mental breakdown. You’re either attracted to someone, or you aren’t. The part of the room that the light hits when the sun comes up has nothing to do with it.

He believes there’s such a thing as total heterosexuality, because he can’t really even imagine having sex with a woman. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to, so probably there are straight guys who feel the same way.

But he doesn’t believe you can wake up one morning and decide that fucking guys might be fun to try. It’s not that casual. Maybe because Harden has been gay for as long as he can remember, because he has never been anything _except_ gay, maybe because it’s this fairly central part of his life, maybe that’s why he can’t believe a person just taking it and leaving it, or leaving him, or saying, “I’m still not gay,” right before unbuckling his belt.

But Mulder says that to him and Harden thinks that it might not be true, but there’s no doubt that Mulder’s sure of it.

Mulder, if pressed, would probably mumble something about his leg, missing the playoffs, and nothing else can possibly matter right now. Definitely not the Canadian kid in his bed, none of it is going in the books this season.

But there’s more than baseball between them now, and it’s near time for Mulder to understand that.

Harden wonders if there’s a sub-clause in the Gay Boy Code, wherein sleeping with straight guys in denial is okay. Tricky area, denial. Certain things he can’t say, certain things he can’t do, because for a week or two, Mulder spends half the time so antsy he jerks and tightens his hold whenever Harden tries to do anything new.

But that’s got to be it, it’s the only explanation. There’s no reason why Mulder shouldn’t be as good at being in denial as he is at everything else, and he sold it well enough to convince Rich Harden, who prides himself on being able to see through bullshit and properly interpret hidden signals. Maybe it’s just that Mulder sees it as a challenge. Nobody thought he could do it, and that’s the only motivation he needs.

Harden has to teach Mulder everything, the hows and wheres of doing this with a man, technique and beginner’s lessons. It’s interesting, being the one who knows for once. Mulder picks it up pretty quickly, once he gets past the point of caring, and it’s not all that difficult getting him to that point.

Here’s the thing. Mulder’s about three or four blowjobs away from getting over it. Wanting to sleep with Rich Harden, not _instead_ of girls but _in addition_ to girls, the revelation that guys didn’t mean no girls ever again, didn’t mean he was any less straight, just. More gay.

Mulder’s close, and Harden will be here when he finally gets it all set in his mind.

Anyway, Mulder says, “I’m still not gay,” and Harden mumbles into his stomach, “Whatever you say,” and whips Mulder’s belt off, leather burn on his palms.

It’s the first day of October and if Harden were keeping track, he’d know they’ve been doing this for a month. Today Rich Harden pitched in his first postseason game, got the win in twelfth inning, a walk-off bunt unlike any moment he has ever experienced on a baseball field, and at some bizarre unexplored level, it’s not even the best thing that’s happened to him tonight.

*

Mulder comes with them to Boston. There’s no chance that he’d miss it, whatever ends up happening out there. He’s still a phantom limb and it’s sometimes better when they can see him, looking the same as always. Sometimes better, mostly worse.

And Mulder’s hurt for good, he’s not healing quickly or slowly or anything, just normal-paced, infuriatingly anticlimactic. He’s been working like hell anyway, going through drills and down in the weight room when the rest of them are lazing around in the clubhouse, because the ALCS is there before them, twenty-seven outs away, and anything can happen.

Harden indulges in dumb fantasies about a miraculous recovery, Mulder exceeding every expectation, and then in the pennant game, it would come down like a movie, Mulder walking out of the bullpen into the wail of the crowd, limping just enough for everyone to tell, and it would be this incredible thing.

Still, he comes to Boston. They wouldn’t ask him to stay at home, not when they’re up two games to none.

Harden’s rooming with Bobby Crosby, just three weeks up from the minors and already anointed, crouching next to Tejada on the field and learning all he can while Eric Chavez circles them like a shark and shouts out extra advice. Harden likes Crosby okay, a throwback to the first half of the season that he spent in Sacramento, with Crosby behind him spinning and side-arm throwing when Harden put anything on the ground to the left side, but he misses back before the roster expanded, when he got his own room.

That first night, Harden and Crosby are sitting in the hall, waiting for someone to come out and take them drinking, and Crosby says, “Mark says we all should live together next year.”

“Yeah?”

Crosby nods, his knees pulled up against his chest. His shoes are untied, because he just got out of the shower, and he fiddles with the laces. “Says he knows about this place in Walnut Creek. Supposed to be nice.” He smiles, his potential showing through plainly. “Tired of living in hotels, man.”

“Yeah.” Harden wonders if Mulder will ask him for rent next season. Wonders if maybe he’s paid the price already, an exchange of goods and services. Rich Harden, gigolo to the stars. He snickers, turning his face into his arm to cover it.

Suddenly Zito and Chavez burst from around the corner, brandishing water guns and shouting “rooookeee!”

Crosby yelps and they both leap to their feet, taking off down the hallway. Harden has time to feel a cold wet spot grow on his shoulder blade, and see Crosby run right out of his shoes, leaving them behind like souvenirs on the floor, his socked feet thumping, and then they veer off in opposite directions at the end of the hall. Zito and Chavez let Harden go, and he ducks into the stairwell, hearing Crosby howl in protest, cornered, before the door clicks shut.

Harden goes down a flight and waits for things to calm down. He reads the fire evacuation instructions on the wall a couple of times, then starts playing Tetris on his phone.

He gets to the third level before the door opens, and he cowers low behind the turn of the stairs, fearing a fresh attack, but it’s just Mulder, stepping down gingerly and saying his name.

Harden goes to the landing and Mulder stops, a step or two down, and they look at each other for a minute, the stairs between them and Mulder up there with his hand on the rail, an indecipherable expression on his face and Harden’s name hanging in the air.

*

Bobby’s up till two hours past curfew, and by then it’s really late, and it’s really dumb, but Harden’s having trouble, so he waits until the lights are off and Bobby’s finally shut the fuck up, before sneaking off to Mulder’s room, and Mulder doesn’t care, it’s not like he’s got a game to pitch in tomorrow.

Mulder lets him in without question and they play Xbox for awhile. It’s been a long day and tomorrow will be even worse. Harden wants to talk about it, about cross-country flights and being here and Fenway Park and all the stuff that could happen, but he’s not sure if he’s allowed. He can’t imagine that Mulder will want to hear it.

Eventually, Harden takes the controller out of Mulder’s hand and pushes him down on the carpet, crawls on top of him. Mulder tips his face up, hands open on Harden’s back.

Not too far into it, shirts gone but not pants, Harden hooks a thumb in the waist of Mulder’s jeans and tugs down, just an inch or two to see a hollow, an angle of bone under the skin. And Mulder pushes up against him and Harden loses his balance, his hand skidding off Mulder’s bare chest and by accident, honestly, not meaning to do anything except stop falling, Harden braces himself on Mulder’s bad hip, the heel of his palm pressing down hard. Mulder jerks violently away, hissing and digging his teeth into his lip. Harden, panicked, shoves off him, saying quickly, “dude, so sorry, are you okay, so so sorry.”

Mulder shakes his head, his eyes closed and his hands carefully folded around his hip. He breathes through it, moment by moment, and the thought Harden had that Mulder might scream from the pain gets less and less likely to happen.

“Idiot,” Mulder says through his teeth.

“I know I know. I suck.” Harden tries an apologetic smile, flickering his hand just above the carpet. He reaches for Mulder, just to kind of push his fingers at some part of him that’s not injured, but Mulder shifts away.

“Just stay over there for a second and let me recover.” Mulder closes his eyes again. “Don’t leave or nothing.”

“Won’t leave.” Harden lays back. “I really am sorry.”

They’re quiet for minute or two. There’s some sort of draft or something, down here on the floor. Skinny little pages of chill, slipping in through the window. Boston in October, and Harden wonders if it ever snows at this time of year. He definitely misses snow.

Harden looks over at Mulder, an expression of far-away concentration on Mulder’s face, like he’s counting heartbeats. “So, um,” Harden says. “Next year?”

“Hmm.” Mulder’s hands are still on his hip, one flat atop the other, fingers curved down and interlaced.

“Yeah, Crosby was saying, earlier,” Harden continues, feeling strangely nervous after all this time. “About maybe we’d get a house again?”

“Certainly not gonna change the luck now,” Mulder tells him, and Harden is surprised, he didn’t realize that it was for luck. All of it, windchimes and rented furniture and the pool turning green at the edges when they get back from a road trip, the first home Harden has ever known that has no family in it, and he’s thinking, ‘lucky boy, lucky lucky boy.’

“Okay. Cool.” Harden grins up at the ceiling. It’s bad to make assumptions about who will be around next year, it’s dangerous to take the off-season for granted, he knows that perfectly well and Mulder knows it even better, but fuck it. A house in Walnut Creek. A house just like the one they’ve got now, with a new address and a new set of possibility and near escapes.

He looks over and finds Mulder looking back. There’s a vertical line between Mulder’s eyebrows, his cheek twitching as he clenches his teeth against the diminishing pain. Harden feels microscoped, and scowls. “What?”

Mulder’s eyes narrow infinitesimally. “You never even look at girls.”

Harden blinks. “Um. What?”

Mulder takes one hand carefully off his hip, dragging his fingers carefully along the dent where his leg meets his body. He’s almost glaring. “I’ve been watching. You never, _never_ , you never even look.”

“What girls? When?” Harden shakes his head, because that’s not the point. “I mean, dude. Like. Gay.” He thumps himself on the chest. “Entirely gay.”

“Nobody’s all one or the other.” Mulder sits up very slowly, his one hand still attached, leaning his weight on the other side. Blueblue eyes and his mouth still wet, and Harden doesn’t know how anybody could even think about girls with Mark Mulder in the room.

“Sometime, somewhere, you musta seen a chick and thought, god I’d like to fuck her. Sometime, right?” Mulder lifts his eyebrows encouragingly. Harden sighs and sits up too, crossing his legs.

“No, man. Maybe in, like, a dream. But not that I can remember. I’m just.” He stops talking, frustrated. He’s never had to actively explain it before.

“You’re just gay,” Mulder says with a sneer in his tone that Harden picks up on without trouble. Mulder gets up and sits on the bed, and Harden gets paranoid that Mulder’s trying to stay above him, that if Harden joins him on the bed, Mulder will stand on a chair, and then Mulder will be on the roof, reaching his hands up for a helicopter, if Harden only pushes him far enough.

Harden snaps his head, trying to clear it, and Mulder says, “So you’ve fucked around with a lot of guys, then.”

Harden tries to smile. “Less than a roster, I swear.”

Mulder doesn’t even seem to hear. “You know, you should fuckin’ warn people when you meet them. You shouldn’t keep it all secret.”

“Excuse me,” Harden says, feeling heat roll behind his eyes. “Of the two people in the room who’ve sucked cock, I’m the one who can say it out loud, all right? You really wanna talk about keeping secrets, man?”

Mulder’s face darkens and Harden thinks, ‘fuck.’ “Okay, I think you should go,” Mulder tells him, fists closed in the bedsheets.

“No,” Harden says, way too loudly, wincing. He cuts his eyes around guiltily, swallows hard. “No,” he repeats more quietly. “I’ve had it with this.” He waves his hand around. “This fucking freshman-year-of-high-school coming-out shit. I already did this, I’ve done it a million times. It’s not even interesting anymore.”

Mulder’s mouth curls in a fascinating shape, all bitter and knotted. “Jesus, fucking forgive me for boring you. And I’m not coming out, goddamn it.”

“Yeah, I _know_.”

Looking as if he’d like to beat Harden unrecognizable, Mulder tells him, his voice cracking hoarsely right from the start, “I’m not like you. I’m not. Like you.”

Harden feels something snap. “Yes you fucking _are_ , dude. God.” He gets up on his knees and clutches Mulder’s knees in his hands. “You like me, will you please get over that? You want to fuck me, fantastic. I want to fuck you. It’s amazing. It’s not something to, to fight.”

He slides his hands up Mulder’s legs, Mulder staring down at him in shock. Harden concentrates on his hands, the tough of Mulder’s jeans under his palms, the muscles shivering. “You gotta catch up, man, or you’re gonna miss it,” he whispers.

He fishhooks his fingers in Mulder’s belt loops, intensely cautious of his hip, and Mulder’s hands flick and circle his wrists, holding him still. Harden looks up, his face lit and hopeful.

Mulder pushes his thumbs along the insides of Harden’s wrists, closing his eyes once more. “You don’t understand anything.”

All at once scared, Harden thinks that maybe that’s true. Maybe he’s got all this wrong. “Tell me, then.”

Mulder shakes his head, so tense he’s trembling. “I don’t want you at all,” he says without looking up. “I don’t want any of this.”

It hurts a lot, and then Harden is wrenching his hands out of Mulder’s grasp, and crowding forward. He rises so that he can shove Mulder back on the bed, not careful at all now, he gets Mulder pressed down and kisses him as he rips open Mulder’s jeans and drags them off his legs. Mulder’s hand clenches on Harden’s arm and Harden’s not sure if Mulder is only allowing this for fear of aggravating his injury if he fights back.

But now he’s got all of Mulder, flushed beneath him and Harden slips back onto his knees on the floor and makes patterns with his teeth on Mulder’s skin until Mulder’s hand is on the back of his head, his stomach contracting under Harden’s palm.

And Mulder’s taking the Lord’s name in vain, clawing at Harden’s hair and leaving long red lines on Harden’s shoulders, and Harden jerks back, hard enough to tear a limb off, falls back on the floor, gasping. He stands quickly, though his legs feel collapsed and his chest caved in. Mulder lifts his head, his eyes gone black and his lip bleeding, and spits in disbelief, “hey, what the _fuck_ ,” before Harden swipes a hand across his mouth and says hysterically:

“Don’t want me at all, not at all, yeah sure,” and then he staggers out of the room, lights huge and blasting in his head, his hand on his chest and his heart branded against his ribs. He falls against the wall and can’t hold himself up, finds himself on the floor, bent over his knees, barefoot and shirtless and the heels of his hands rasped by the carpet. Fuck, that happened fast.

It takes him five minutes of will power to keep from going back in, finishing Mulder off and getting his own, it takes every part of him.

Another five minutes waiting to make sure Mulder isn’t coming after him. Harden rakes his hands across his face, scrubbing hard, hearing insistently in his mind, ‘fuckyou fuckyou fuckyou fuck you so much and forever and ever and ever.’

He goes back to his own room when he’s sure he can walk, shutting the door as quietly as possible behind him. He takes off his jeans and sits on the edge of the bed, rubbing his hands together and feeling worse than he ever has in his life, or at least that he can remember. Crosby coughs and rolls over, blinking at him.

“Where were you?”

Harden makes a smile, shrugs. He’s positive that it shows all over his face. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Crosby nods agreeably, his eyes bleary and dim, most of the way closed. Harden thinks that Crosby’s got the right idea about how to be a rookie, he just sleeps through everything.

Crosby rolls back over, murmuring as he falls asleep, “You’ll be all right. It’s all gonna be great,” as if he’s not the greenest kid in the state, as if he’s been here for years, as if he knows it for sure.

*

So everything goes to hell and by the time they get back to Oakland, the series is tied and Rich Harden is scared out of his mind.

Mulder hasn’t spoken to him since what happened, but Harden catches him looking sometimes, across the room, through a doorway. Harden thinks about Mulder saying, “you never even look at girls,” and thinks bitterly that it can hardly be argued that Mulder doesn’t look at guys. The pressure of Mulder’s gaze on him is a tangible thing, Harden’s shoulders pulled up to support it. It’s not a kind thing. No more kind things ever.

Harden gets to their house first and immediately shuts himself up in his room. He hears doors open and slam back, the rumble of a phone conversation from the living room, and then Mark Ellis is down the hall at Mulder’s room, asking, “Dude, you coming out with us, or what?”

Harden listens as closely as possible, but he can’t hear Mulder’s response, just Ellis answering, “Whatever, be that way,” and then Ellis’s footsteps padding past his own door. Harden doesn’t know why Ellis didn’t invite him along—maybe Ellis doesn’t know he’s home. He thinks about going out there and seeing what’s going on, but in the end he doesn’t feel up to moving.

This was a lousy idea from the beginning, but Harden’s pretty sure he can’t be blamed. He’s pretty sure Mulder will come out of this more fucked up than he will, which is good enough for now.

He falls asleep without being aware of it, and wakes up a few times, coming and going like a hologram. His dreams are disjointed and mostly about baseball, which is something of a surprise, actually. For three days now, they’ve seen the Yankees on the horizon like sentinels, and for three days now they’ve fallen short. They came into Boston with everything on their side, and it’s not yet been established what they’ve misplaced, but it’s something pretty fucking important.

Harden doesn’t think he likes getting to the playoffs all that much. It’s just too much. He can hardly breathe.

He wakes up for the third, fourth, fifth time, and Mulder looks like a shadow, a hallucination, for a long time, standing at the foot of the bed, long crooked shape in the darkness. Harden mumbles in greeting and turns over onto his side, and then a second later says to himself, “wait,” before turning back over and checking and Mulder’s still there, watching him.

Harden sits up, cracking his back. “What are you doing?”

Mulder shrugs, pushes his hands into his pockets. Harden rubs his eyes, feeling slow and deeply confused. “You shouldn’t be in here,” he says helplessly.

Mulder shrugs again. Harden wishes he would go, it’s not right. Harden’s not entirely clear on what happened in Boston, but he’d bet money that it was an ending.

Neither of them says anything for awhile. Harden’s mouth is dry and sticky and his arm hurts because he was lying on it funny.

“I was just. Wondering,” Mulder says eventually. He scuffs the floor with his foot. “Sorta, like. What do we do now? ‘Cause, obviously, I never did this before. And probably never again, I think.” He nods to himself, repeating quietly, “probably not again,” before running a hand over his hair and continuing, “but I guess you have, so you know how it. How it goes from here.”

Harden exhales through his nose, not realizing that he’d been holding his breath. For the first time all year, he feels impossibly old, worn out and beyond recovery. He shakes his head. “It’s actually. New to me, too.”

Mulder’s eyes get thin and tight and Harden can tell Mulder doesn’t believe him. He sighs, and says slowly, intently, “I’ve never done this. Not with someone like you. Not like the way it’s been. I don’t know . . . I can’t tell you anything.”

Mulder considers him for a long time, the muscles in his arms drawn like cables. Harden fell asleep in his clothes and now his jeans are chafing and his T-shirt is damp with sweat across his shoulder blades and lower back. He’s exhausted, and if they win tomorrow, he doesn’t know what he’ll do, he doesn’t think he can make it through another round, much less two. He understands completely how the A’s, as good as they are, could have been knocked out so early the past three years. This is a life-taking thing that they’re being asked to do.

Suddenly Mulder’s shoulders fall, his head drooping. He rests one hand lightly on his injured hip, touching his fingers so faintly that Harden doubts Mulder can even feel it through his clothes. “I’m so sick of this,” Mulder says, and Harden has no idea what he’s talking about.

Harden lifts his shoulders futilely. “Nothing I can do about that.”

Mulder smirks absently. “There’s a hundred things you could do about it.” He winces, and shakes his head. “No, never mind, forget it. Okay.”

Harden tries to swallow and is unsuccessful. “Look, let’s. It’s over, isn’t it?” He waits until Mulder nods almost imperceptibly. Harden closes his eyes, bowing his head. “So, whatever. It was a bad idea, is all. At least we’re smarter now.”

He keeps his head down and hopes Mulder will take the hint and leave. Instead, Mulder makes a scoffing laugh.

“I’m definitely not smarter.” Harden looks up and Mulder’s looking down at him with this awful expression on his face. “I’m just fucking stupid, that’s all I am,” Mulder tells him distantly, and he’s gone, out the door before Harden can even get off the bed.

Harden leans back against the headboard, hearing Mulder’s door open and shut and the flop of Mulder’s body onto his own bed. Harden winds his hands together, squeezing with his right and thinking about cut and sink and slide, thinking about the black at the edges of the plate and rosin on his fingers, thinking about this season that will not end, and wondering what kind of tragedy it will be if they lose Game Five tomorrow, wondering if he will even care, one way or the other.

THE END


End file.
